Monday, February 29, 2016

Staunton, February 29 – The maintenance
of Western sanctions is contingent upon Ukraine’s willingness to reform itself,
according to former Ukrainian foreign minister Vladimir Ogryzko.If Ukraine does not act, the West will
ultimately lift the sanctions; and Ukraine will have only itself to blame for
its resulting isolation.

“The West is terribly afraid of a
repetition of the situation of 2005 when such dissension led to the loss of all
the achievements of the Maidan. Alas, this influences the attitude of the Est
toward Russia which has not missed a chance to cover Ukraine with dirt, to say
that we are failures and incapable of living without administration from the outside.”

Moscow, of course, wants this to come
from Moscow and not Washington or Brussels,” Ogryzko adds. But both because of
Ukrainian inaction and Moscow’s propaganda effort, “pessimism about the future
possibilities of Ukraine is growing in the West,” and thus more questions are
being raised about lifting sanctions against Russia.

“If Ukraine itself does not want to
take a tough line, then the question logically arises in the West as to why it
should be more Catholic than the pope and do everything for [Ukrainians], the
Kyiv diplomat says.“Alas, this tendency
is appearing ever more clearly in recent times.”

But he concludes on a more
optimistic note saying that sanctions will continue for a time; but “this
extension cannot be infinite without active moves by Ukraine. If reforms, the
struggle with corruption and genuine Ukrainian sanctions against Russia don’t
occur, then the currently expected extension of sanctions may be the last.”

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Staunton,
February 28 – As the 100th anniversary of the 1917 revolution that
led to a partial disintegration of the empire and the 25th
anniversary of the 1991 events that led to the demise of the USSR approach,
Russia appears to have entered “another round” of a cycle in which the pursuit
of imperial greatness “will lead to foreign pressure and internal
disintegration.”

That
is the judgment of Aleksandr Rubtsov, the head of the Moscow Center for the
Analysis of Ideological Processes, who says this outcome is even more likely
because Moscow’s “current imperial pretensions in large measure are virtual and
extremely limited in the resources” as far as the resources available to pursue
them are concerned (rbc.ru/opinions/society/26/02/2016/56cfe95f9a7947ed925e57de?from=typeindex%2Fopinion).

In addition, there is a clash
between “the sources of today’s hysteria about great power status” and the changing
“nature of empire” in the post-modern period.The first reflects a longing for the past; the second, the fact that “geographic
closenss and the occupation of land means much less” than it did in the past.

Physical geography, Rubtsov
continues, “does not have its former importance;” and traditional empires based
on borders and control of territory “are giving way to information, financial,
technological, research, cultural and other former of empire.”In this new world, “annexation of territory
and hybrid wars don’t give very much.”

Worse, they are quite expensive, based
on “extremely primitive instincts” and mostly are “calculated in terms of their
psychological effect.”

Rubtsov points out that “the
disintegration of the USSR did not immediately become the geopolitical
catastrophe of the century,” as Vladimir Putin has termed it.For the first decade or so after 1991,
Russians focused on survival, development and modernization rather than on “global
greatness.”

“The new imperial spirit” arose, he
continues, partly as a result of propaganda that benefited Putin by distracting
the attention of Russians from problems he wasn’t solving and present him as a
real leader and partly as “the product of an unconscious striving to compensate”
for what Russian really felt was the denigration of their status.

But the sources are even deeper than
that, Rubtsov says, and reflect the way Russian rulers have looked not only at
foreign affairs but at areas already within their borders, considering all as
either under Russian power and influence or potentially so in the future, he suggests.

“The idea of rehabilitating a great power
spirit matured and was prepared gradually,” he continues.Moscow’s actions in Serbia, Chechnya and
Georgia reflected its growth, “but the official ideology in the main for a long
time was concentrated on other themes, on modernization, the overcoming of
technological backwardness, and a reduction of dependence on oil and gas.”

After
Putin returned for a third term, it became obvious to all that escaping
dependence on the sale of oil and gas abroad had failed as a political project
and that “dependence on the export of raw materials had only grown.”That made the promotion of imperial pride and
ensuing foreign aggression especially useful as ways of distracting attention.

But
there is much in the current cycle that recalls earlier ones, Rubtsov says. “Such
is the evolution of the idea of empire in Russia: a strong power with a clear
imperial mission – a place des armes of world revolution – a bastion of
progress and hope for humanity” and as a result disasters for the population
because those in power ultimately have nothing else to offer them.

“The
imperial spirt compensates for the lack of resolution of real problems and
informs domestic policy, including modernization of a post-Soviet type,” he
concludes.But the retreat from modernization
categorically raises the question about the survivability of the empire even in
its residual form.”

Whether
Russia can break out of this vicious circle is an open question, Rubtsov says. “The
symbolism of dates doesn’t mean anything, but ahead are the anniversaries of
the disintegration of the USSR and of a revolution which almost put a cross
over the [Russian] empire.”

Staunton, February 28 – Many are
inclined to believe that Russians strongly hold “abnormal” values; but in fact,
sociologist Ella Paneyakh says, the values they hold are quite normal but they
are only weakly attached to them.As a
result, there often occur sudden and otherwise apparently inexplicable changes
in the goals and directions Russians take.

And because Russians’ attachment to
these values are relatively weak, the St. Petersburg scholar says, they are
even more profoundly affected by the institutional arrangements that those in
power may impose and go along as a survival strategy rather than seek to assert
themselves on the basis of their own value systems (ehorussia.com/new/node/12119).

The
values Russians have, Paneyakh says, are well within the range of the universal
values other nations have; but “the problem is that [these values] are weakly
held” and thus far less likely to be the basis for action if those in power
demand that Russians act according to other values.

She
bases her conclusions on the cultural map of the world produced by Ronald
Inglehart and his team on the basis of the World Values Survey that has been
conducted since the early1980s, a survey that found that Russia “however
strange this may seem” is a secular society similar in that regard to Hungary,
Belgium and France.

That
survey showed, however, that Russians were significantly less attached to “self-expression
values” than people in developed countries. Instead, as tended to be the case
with less-developed countries, they were more attached to what Inglehart and
his colleagues called “survival values.” But in neither case were they complete
outliers, Paneyakh says.

Thus,
for example, Russians displayed far lower levels of trust in others than most
more developed countries; but they had roughly the same level in this regard as
the French, the Hungarians, and the Poles. According to many analysts, the
sociologist says, “a high level of trust arises in those societies where there
are developed legal systems.”

The
explanation for that is very simple, Paneyakh says. “if institutions function poorly,
people do not trust one another and consequently there does not arise
sufficiently effective economic cooperate and economic growth is restricted.”

With
regard to self-assertion, she continues, “it is surprising but a fact that
sociologists who have conducted corresponding measures have found that Russians
value self-assertion even more than the British do, but at the same time, they
highly value stability” – and that affects the manifestation of what they value
when institutions are weak.

From
this, Paneyakh draws the following conclusion: Russia isn’t being held back by
some kind of “’incorrect’” values that don’t work with well contemporary
economic ones but rather by something else. And that is this: the values of
Russia are quite normal but they are weakly held and do not feel that they can
act on them under existing conditions.

She
gives as an example of this the case of judges who in Russia are part of the
bureaucracy rather than an independent agency. Consequently, they behave
according to the rules of bureaucratic life rather than according to the
principles of law, something that makes each case different and eliminates the
predictability people need to act on their principles.

Paneyakh
draws three “practical conclusions” for her findings. First, Russians have “completely
ordinary values” common to European civilization. Second, these values are
manifested or not depending on Russian circumstances and thus will become more
often displayed if the circumstances change.

And
third, any change in the political, social or economic system in Russia to be
meaningful requires not just the change of individuals in roles that now exist but
a change in the system of roles as a whole. For European values to be manifest
in Russia, Russian institutions must be replaced by others.

Paneyakh
concludes that this may have a positive consequence for Russia: If institutions
are radically transformed, Russians will be able to accept that without serious
conflicts because they are not as attached to these institutions as tightly as
many assume and because their values are what they are.